Are politicians office or policy motivated? The case of U.S. governors' environmental policies

“…The parametric approach to RDD uses all elections in the sample where a Democrat and a Republican are the top two candidates and absorbs variation coming from non‐close elections using flexible controls for the vote margin ( m ) (Ferreira and Gyourko, ), where vote margin is constructed as the Democratic candidate's percentage of the vote share (minus 50%) that go to the top two gubernatorial candidates. The approach allows an estimation of the causal effect of party affiliation on the economic outcome by exploiting the fact that the party affiliation is a deterministic function of vote margin (Angrist and Pischke, ; Fredriksson et al., ; Leigh, ) . That is:

D G_{i} = \{\begin{matrix} 1 if m_{i} \geq 0 \\ 0 if m_{i} < 0 \end{matrix}

such that E ( ɛ | DG , m ) = E ( ɛ | m ) = f ( m ) (Fredriksson et al., ), where f ( m ) is a control function (that is, a low‐order polynomial in m ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Consistent with Leigh () and Fredriksson et al. (), I use RDD to mitigate the concern about the endogeneity associated with gubernatorial party affiliation. RDD allows the identification of the causal effect of party affiliation by comparing states where a Democrat barely won an election with states where the Democrat barely lost (Ferreira and Gyourko, ; Lee, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Party Politics, Governors, and Healthcare Expenditures

Joshi

2014

Economics & Politics

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This study examines the impact of gubernatorial partisanship on the growth of healthcare expenditures (HCE) for a panel dataset of 50 U.S. states over the 1991–2009 period. Using the parametric regression discontinuity design, I find no partisan effect on the growth of state's per capita real total personal HCE. However, an analysis of the growth rates of the components of HCE suggests that there is a causal effect of party affiliation on the “prescription drugs” component. These findings are robust to the inclusion of additional covariates in the parametric approach as well to the use of the non‐parametric regression discontinuity approach. The results further suggest that the impact of gubernatorial partisanship does not depend on the length of the governor's term in office.

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“…bicameralism) (Fredriksson & Millimet , ), term limits for elected officials (Fredriksson et al . ), and ministerial discretion (Bäck et al . ).…”

Section: Empirical Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Partisan politics, welfare states, and environmental policy outputs in the OECD countries, 1975–2005

Lim

Duit

2017

Regulation & Governance

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Building on the burgeoning literature on the association between the welfare state and the environmental state, this study empirically examines how the politics of the former has affected the development of the latter. We suggest that the size of the welfare state shapes the calculus of environmental policy costs by partisan governments. A generous welfare state lowers the costs perceived by the left‐wing government, as large redistributive spending allows the government to mitigate the adverse impact of the new environmental policy on its core supporters, industrial workers. A generous welfare state also implies diminished marginal political returns from additional welfare commitment by the left‐wing government, which lowers the opportunity costs of environmental policy expansion. To the contrary, because of lower overall regulatory and taxation pressure, a small welfare state reduces the costs of environmental policy expansion as perceived by a right‐wing government. Our theoretical narrative is supported in a dynamic panel data analysis of environmental policy outputs in 25 Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development member states during the period 1975–2005.

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Are politicians office or policy motivated? The case of U.S. governors' environmental policies

Cited by 48 publications

References 44 publications

The political economy of passing climate change legislation: Evidence from a survey

The political economy of passing climate change legislation: Evidence from a survey

Party Politics, Governors, and Healthcare Expenditures

Partisan politics, welfare states, and environmental policy outputs in the OECD countries, 1975–2005

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